Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [235]
By the time the press preview took place at the end of the month, Zanuck was talking up the idea of a sequel covering Stanley’s later life and career in politics, a notion predicated on the availability of Tracy, an increasingly unlikely proposition. Zanuck never got the flippant tone he sought to achieve for Stanley, and the Reporter thought the picture “almost severely scholarly in its approach.” It was, nevertheless, a big and appealing film, idealistic in its posture and grand in its scope, the African footage giving it the texture, in parts, of a documentary. That it lacked dramatic punch was more a failing of the screenplay than of the cast or the director, but it also lacked the kind of hokum that often distinguished a Hollywood biography, at least up to the end, where Stanley (hardly the salvationist the movie suggests) returns to Africa to the strains of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Contrary to Tracy’s early assessment, Variety predicted “socko biz” for Stanley and Livingstone and turned out to be right. Strong billboard and snipe support from the studio—and some unseasonably rainy weather—helped fill the New York Roxy, where Tracy’s name meant considerably more than it had in the old days. The picture sustained a three-week stand, then went out as the first big Fox release of the new season. With I Take This Woman on the shelf and Northwest Passage still in production, it stood to be Tracy’s only release for the year 1939. “Wrong again!” he wrote in amending his earlier prognostication. “Big hit.”
Until Stanley and Livingstone, Tracy had been off screen for nearly a year—since Boys Town—an almost intolerable length of time for a major star. Yet his absence hadn’t affected his standing with either exhibitors or the public. “Comes the revolution!” wrote Edwin Schallert in anticipation of the year-end exhibitor polls.
This year, if any, there will be the biggest shake-up ever in the stars that rule the motion picture box office. Four years the top-notcher in most polls, Shirley Temple, will probably register in about third place. Clark Gable, runner-up to the child star, may hit shakily around fifth or sixth. The winners will list about as follows: Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Sonja Henie, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Deanna Durbin, Mickey Rooney, Errol Flynn, and Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne as a team. The order may not be exactly correct, but those are the ones likely to be supreme and all the charges and counter-charges against this writer may be duly filed around the end of the year when listings are more or less officially proclaimed.
Schallert’s predictions were largely accurate. Tracy placed third behind Rooney and Power in the Quigley poll of moneymaking stars, but firmly ahead of Gable, who came in fourth. Shirley Temple’s standing had fallen due to advancing age—she was eleven—and Gable’s one release of the season had been the atypical Idiot’s Delight. (He was otherwise offscreen making Gone With the Wind for Selznick.) In October, Fortune published the results of a survey by Elmo Roper that asked two questions of the moviegoing public: Who is your favorite movie actor? and Who is your favorite movie actress? To the second question, 4.6 percent of all respondents answered Bette Davis, followed by Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald, Irene Dunne, and Norma Shearer in descending order. (Temple, who ranked first in 1937, placed sixth.) To the first question, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore placed second through fifth, respectively. In first place, named by 5.6 percent of all respondents, was Spencer Tracy.
Tracy photographed at his Encino ranch, January 2, 1941. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Buoyed, perhaps, by the milestone, Tracy began looking at boats again, casually at first, and then with a certain urgency, given that he could, at last, permit himself a modicum of luxury. Off days were spent